
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, August 1, 1994                   TAG: 9408010032
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

EVOLUTION

A CASE making its way through the courts offers an opportunity, incredible as it may seem that one is needed, to affirm both the value of science education in public-school curriculum, and the difference between science and religion.

A teacher, John Peloza, has brought a lawsuit insisting on his right to teach creationism to biology students. This week, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals returned the case, on technical grounds, to a lower court for another hearing.

And so the Scopes trial of the 1920s, in which religious fundamentalists attempted to discredit the scientific theory of evolution, keeps going on and on.

The way science works is that a theory, especially one as thoroughly based on methods of scientific inquiry and confirmed by mountains of empirical data as evolution is, can be overturned by new evidence, but not by dogma. Religious inculcation has its place, but that place isn't the public schools.

by CNB